And now the north wind urged them to depart;
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the sails flapped noisily against the masts
and the mariner had whistled up a breeze.
“Farewell, O Troy, for we are carried off,”
they cry, kissing the earth as they relinquish
their still-smoldering homes. Last to embark—
a pitiable sight—was Hecuba,
discovered at the princes’ sepulchers,
clutching the tombs and kissing their dry bones;
Ulysses broke her grip and dragged her off,
but she hid Hector’s ashes in her bosom,
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and left locks of her white hair on his tomb,
her hair and tears a pointless offering.
There is, across the way from where Troy was,
a country that the men of Thrace inhabit;
here was the wealthy court of Polymestor,
to whom, O Polydorus, your father Priam,
entrusted you in secret to be raised
far from the fighting: a wise decision,
had he not sent you off with a great treasure,
provoking avarice and ensuring evil.
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When Troy collapsed, the impious Thracian king
savagely cut the throat of his young charge,
and then, as though to show that crimes could be
eliminated just as easily
as victims are, the corpse of Polydorus
was tossed down from a cliff into the sea.
Awaiting quiet seas and a steady wind,
Agamemnon gave orders that the fleet
was to be moored along the Thracian coast;
quite unexpectedly, the ground split open,
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and there emerged the ghost of great Achilles,
as large, and in his form as threatening
as in that time when, like a wild man, he
went after Agamemnon with his sword
and challenged him for his unjust behavior:
“O Greeks,” he said, “do you depart for home
heedless of me? My body lies decayed,
as are the thanks you owe me for my service!
This cannot be: so that my sepulcher
may not go without honor, let my shade
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be pleasured by the death of Polyxena.”
He finished speaking, and the Greeks obeyed
his unforgiving ghost: torn from the arms
of her mother Hecuba, for whom the maiden
was almost the only comfort she had left,
that fierce, unfortunate, unfeminine
virgin was brought directly to the grave
and sacrificed upon that ominous tomb.
And after she had been brought to the altar,
and realized that she would be the victim
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of this cruel sacrifice, not even then
did she forget herself; but when she saw
Neoptolemus waiting, blade in hand
and eyes fixed on her countenance, she said,
“The time has come to spill my noble blood;
let there be no delay: plunge your blade now
into my throat or breast,” and she bared both,
“for you may rest assured: Polyxena
does not desire to live as a slave!
“My only wish is that my death somehow
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could be unnoticed by my mother,
for her awareness of it spoils the joy
that I would take in it—although her life,
and not my death, should really make her tremble!
“Do not press close around me now, if what
I ask of you is just: let no man’s hand
defile a maiden’s honor by its touch,
lest I go to the Styx unwillingly!
My death will be more acceptable to him,
whoever he is, whom you propitiate,
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if I endure it willingly. But if
any are moved by these last words of mine—
no captive maid but Priam’s daughter asks!—
then let my mother have my body back
without a ransom; let her tears, not gold,
redeem my corpse for its sad funeral:
when she was able to, she gave you gold.”
The tears that she was able to restrain
flowed in abundance from the eyes of those
who heard her speak; and even as he plunged
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his blade into the breast she offered him,
the priest himself, though with reluctance, wept.
Her knees gave out, and she slid to the ground,
a resolute expression on her face
right to the end—and as she fell took care
to cover up those parts that should be hidden
and served the honor of her chastity.
The Trojan women took her body up,
once more lamenting another child of Priam,
the many victims given by one house;
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and they mourned you, who, until yesterday,
had been the king’s consort and queen-mother,
the image of an Asia in its prime—
now, even for a captive, you appear
especially unfortunate. Ulysses,
in his triumph, would surely not have wished
you to be his, except that you gave birth
to Hector, who would not have chosen him
to be his mother’s master and her lord!
She bathed her daughter’s corpse now with the tears
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that she had shed so often for her country,
her children, and her husband; she poured those tears
into her daughter’s wound, and kissed her face
and beat her own breast, accustomed to the gesture,
and as she plucked her hair in bloody clumps,
these words, and even more than these, she cried:
“O daughter, the last grief of your poor mother,
what else is there still left for me to lose?
The wound that you were given is my own,
lest I should ever lose a child of mine
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without it being murdered—and yet you,
because you were a woman, I imagined,
would be safe from the sword—but even so,
as a woman, you too have perished by it,
killed as so many of your brothers were,
the victims of Achilles, who has bereft
the Trojan people and their helpless queen.
“But after he had fallen to the arrows
of Paris and Apollo, I said, ‘Surely
Achilles is no longer to be feared!’
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Now more than ever I had cause to fear him!
The very ashes in his sepulcher
despise our race, and even from the grave
we feel the enmity that he still bears us!
I have been fruitful for Achilles’ sake!
“Great Troy has fallen, and the public woe
has ended in calamity—yet it has ended:
for me alone the story still continues,
my ship of sorrow holds its steady course.
“So very fortunate till recently,
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in children, in their marriages, my husband—
now destitute, an exile, sundered from
my family’s remains! Penelope
will soon display me to her women friends
on Ithaca, and tell them, as I weave
my daily quota, ‘This is Priam’s queen,
and noble Hector’s celebrated mother.’
“Now after all the others have been lost,
you who were left to alleviate my grief
have now been sacrificed upon his tomb!
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The child that I gave birth to
has become
an offering made to Achilles’ ghost!
Why do I linger here, unyielding? To what end
is my old age, rich only in its years?
“O cruel gods, why draw my lifetime out,
unless to show me even further grief?
For who could think that Priam could be called
fortunate after Troy had been demolished?
Only your father’s death was fortunate,
my daughter, for he did not see you die,
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leaving his life and kingdom both at once.
“But surely you, a princess of the blood,
would have your funeral rites as dowry
and lie in state among your ancestors?
No, this is not the fortune of our house:
your only offerings will be my tears,
your burial, upon a foreign beach!
“We have lost everything—yet there remains
what may allow me to continue living
a little while: her mother’s favorite,
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my youngest once, and now my only son,
my Polydorus, sent to the Thracian king
on these same shores. But why do I delay
to wash this cruel wound with water
and bathe your face, still splattered with your blood?”
She finished speaking and went down to shore,
tottering with age, and in her grief
tearing her white hair: “O women of Troy,
fetch me an urn,” the luckless one commanded,
intending to draw water from the sea,
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she found instead the body of her son
washed onto shore, disfigured by the open
wounds carved in it by Thracian implements.
The Trojan women screamed, but Hecuba
was silent in her grief, which had devoured
the tears and the cry that sprang up deep inside her;
she stood stone still and fixed her angry gaze
now on the ground and now upon the heavens,
and sometimes staring at her dead son’s face
and sometimes, and more often, at his wounds,
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as surging rage armed and instructed her.
Yet even in her fury, she behaved
as though she were still queen, and fixed her mind
and her imagination on revenge;
and as a mother lioness, whose cub
is taken from her, follows its spoor back
to find the enemy it cannot see,
so Hecuba, when anger mixed with grief,
forgot her years, but not her bravery,
and went directly to the Thracian king,
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for this cruel murder had been his idea,
and asked him for an audience, pretending
that she would give him gold that she had long
kept hidden for her son. Deceived by this,
and by his customary avarice, the king
came in secret and implored her thus:
“Give your son the treasure, now, Hecuba,
for everything you give will go to him,
as everything you’ve so far given has,
I swear by all the gods.”
She stared at him
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ferociously as he foreswore himself,
and swelling with the flames of indignation,
she seized him, calling to the captive women,
and sank her fingers in his faithless eyes,
and plucked them out—for anger gave her strength—
then plunged her hands, stained with his foul blood,
into the places where his eyes had been
(for they were there no more) and plucked them out.
The Thracians were enraged by this disaster
which befell their king, and started to throw stones
820
and spears at Hecuba; growling, she snapped
at the stones they threw at her, and even though
her jaws were meant for words, she started barking
when she attempted speech. Because of this,
the place has taken (and still takes) its name
[in Greek, Cynossema: Sign of the Dog]
from the place where Hecuba, remembering
the evils of that distant time, would howl
across the Thracian grasslands mournfully.
The Trojans and her enemies, the Greeks,
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were likewise moved by what became of her,
as were the gods in heaven, all of them,
even the one who is the bride and sister
of Jupiter, for Juno, too, denied
that Hecuba deserved to end like this.
Memnon
Although she had supported them with arms,
Aurora had no time to sympathize
when Troy and Hecuba both came to ruin.
The goddess had a care closer to home;
a private grief tormented her, the loss
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of her son Memnon, whom she had just seen
Achilles murder with his deadly spear
on the Phrygian fields; and, as she watched,
the reddish color of the dawn grew pale
and clouds spread over the entire sky.
Aurora was unable to look on
as her son’s body fed the final flames,
but didn’t think it inappropriate,
just as she was, and with her hair unbound,
to fling her arms around the knees of Jove
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and supplement her speech with flowing tears:
“Although I am inferior to all
the other gods that dwell in shining heaven
(my temples being few and far between),
I nonetheless approach you as a goddess,
but not to ask you for more festal days
on earth below, for temples or for altars
ablaze with the bright flames of sacrifice:
nevertheless, if you would just consider
all that I do (though I am just a woman),
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the services I undertake for you,
when, with new light, I sever night from day,
you’d say that I deserved to be rewarded.
“But my present situation and concern
I come because I am bereft of Memnon,
who bravely (but in vain) bore arms for Priam,
and, still a youth, was slain by bold Achilles,
for so you wished it. Now I pray that you,
ruler supreme of all the gods in heaven,
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grant him some honor, a solace for his death
and consolation for his mother’s wound.”
Jupiter nodded, as the towering
pyre collapsed into its leaping flames,
and thick, black smoke clouds blotted out the day,
as when a water nymph exhales a fog
that can’t be penetrated by the sun;
black embers flying up accumulate
into one body, which, thickening, takes shape,
drawing warmth and animation from the fire;
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lightness provides it with a pair of wings,
and birdlike at first, but very soon a bird
in fact, it flies off noisily among
innumerable sisters like itself,
all of them having the same origin.
Three times they flew around the blazing pyre,
and their mournful cries in harmony arose
and filled the air; on their fourth circuit, they
divided into two opposing camps
which waged ferocious war against each other,
890
employing their sharp beaks and curved talons
until they had worn out their wings and breasts;
and then, a
s sacrifices to the dead,
these ashy creatures fell back to the earth,
remembering the hero that they sprang from.
The unexpected offspring took their name
from their creator: they are the Memnonides,
or children of Memnon; when the sun has crossed
the zodiac, their combat is renewed:
they fight and die in mourning for their parent.
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So others wept while Hecuba was barking,
but Aurora was intent on her own grief,
and even to this day she sheds her tears,
the morning dew that falls upon the world.
The daughters of Anius
Nevertheless, the Fates did not allow
the hopes of Troy to perish with the city:
Aeneas, the heroic son of Venus,
brought out the sacred objects in his arms,
and likewise sacred, the venerable burden
of his father, Anchises. These were the spoils of war
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that pious man selected from his wealth,
and with his son Ascanius, he bore
in his fleet of refugees from Antandros
and from pernicious Thrace, so lately stained
with the blood of Polydorus; winds and tides
favored his voyage, and he soon arrived
at Delos, the city of Apollo, which
he entered with his cohorts.
There Anius
the king, who served Apollo as high priest,
received him in his temple and his palace
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and showed him the city, with its famous shrine
containing the two trees Latona gripped
while she was giving birth to the twin gods.
Here they gave incense to the altar’s flame,
then doused it with an offering of wine,
and after sacrificing cattle, burned
the entrails, as was customary, then
went back into the palace and reclined
on piles of carpets and refreshed themselves
with gifts of Ceres and with flowing wine.
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Devout Anchises asked, “Priest of Apollo,
am I mistaken in my recollection,
or did you not have four daughters and a son
when I first came to visit in your city?”
Anius shook his head, bound with white ribbons,
and sadly answered him: “You are not wrong,
O greatest of heroes, for you saw me then
as the father of five children, of whom now
(such the inconstancy of human life!)
I am almost entirely bereft;
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what aid can I expect from my absent son,
who holds the land of Andros (named for him)
in his father’s place, and rules there as its king?
“Apollo gave him the gift of prophecy,
but Bacchus gave a gift to my four daughters
greater than they could have prayed or hoped for: